If the horse has bolted there’s no point in us missing out on a proper roast
dinner

Most of my 60-odd contemporaries at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School worked summer after summer at (in ascending order of popularity): shoe shops in Lancaster, hotels in the Lakes or cafés and restaurants in Morecambe (long hours, best money). So we all left school with a skill and some experience.

Those of us who waitressed – including me – became unafraid of carrying five plates at a time to table (three balanced on left hand and wrist, two slid between right hand fingers and thumb opposite) and we picked up some knowledge of food safety. We learnt that a slab of meat could be cooked if its stink didn’t hurl you from the room; a hunk of cheese could be eaten if the mould was cut off it; a stale egg floats but it won’t kill you either.

In the Portofino (then the ponciest restaurant in north-west Lancashire, I believe), I was taught not to reheat anything twice and shown how to tell when the great bowl of mixed tinned fruits, always kept in the cold pantry, had to be chucked out and replaced with newly opened tinsful: you had to stir it vigorously with a spoon, lean over it and listen. And if it was “singing” – and one day it did! Like a bowl of Rice Krispies! Blimey, eh? – you’d get Emilio to chuck it and open more tins.

Even the cheapest seafront caffs took some care over food safety. One August Bank Holiday (tipping rain) I was in a vast dining room packed with extended families of day-trippers living in hope. So busy that the manageress had brought in a) capsules of prescription Valium and b) her sister to help with the lunchtime service. She gave us the Valium first thing (I spat mine out, having seen what they did to my mother) and told us her sister would “load you for service”.

The sister was brilliant, swift and tidy. We lined up with our arms out, she tucked, fitted and balanced five, six, seven plates of plaice and chips and peas and put her foot to the swing door to hold it open as we exited with our dangerous loads. I was doing fabulously well.

When the disaster happened, I was clutching lunch for a family of six and as the swing door closed behind me I felt the plate balanced on my left wrist was hot – ooh, really hot, ow-OWW – and tried to flick it, and only that one, off me and on to the floor. Failed. The sister raced out with the wide brush and snapped, “Get back in t’kitchen and run it under t’cold tap!” She put a tea towel over my arm and began reloading. How come the fish was ready already, I asked? She said: “Same fish. Keith threw it back in.” But it’s been on the floor! “Aye, and boiling hot fat. Killed the germs. It’d kill you and all if I chucked you in.”

Food safety was a real terror to me during the brief period (a couple of months) when my husband was technically the landlord of the pub. He wasn’t behind the bar; nor charged with managing the barrels, only signing for them, and he didn’t go in the kitchen, but if anybody were sued following a fatal food poisoning, it would have been him.

All that miserableness is over now, and Chris and Laura have made the Royal Oak into the kind of village pub that townies can only dream of – poor beasts. We ate there on Thursday night: I daintily on fabulous mussels and goat’s cheese tart; he hungrily on fish and chips. When we left, I said we should have had beef, to show solidarity. But surely people wouldn’t be avoiding Chris’s lovely pies and steaks, in dread of hippophagia? Surely? I called the pub a minute ago and asked him how the beef was selling. He said overall, his fab homemade hamburgers were 60 per cent down. He said Sunday roast, which always ran three-to-one in favour of beef over lamb, was now t’other way round.

I am distraught about this. If I can speak directly to beef-eaters everywhere (and north-west Hants especially): go out and eat beef! Don’t turn a crisis into a drama. See you at the Oak Sunday.